Robust characters populate a crafty and entertaining whodunit.
A woman moves into her late aunt’s Florida home but learns a killer may be lurking in the neighborhood in this murder mystery.
Dawn Andersen and her parents are understandably distraught over Aunt Amy’s murder in South Florida. But after the Ohio family heads to Amy’s cottage in Manatee Beach, 25-year-old Dawn thinks she’s found her new home. Her parents—who now own the house—reluctantly let her move in, especially because authorities have arrested the person they believe is Amy’s killer. Dawn quits her job in Columbus but isn’t even settled into her new home when she spots a hulking figure loitering in the vicinity. Later discovering that this person is her next-door neighbor does nothing to ease her anxiety. Unfortunately, it soon turns out the alleged murderer has an alibi, and police initially connect two other deaths with Amy’s, both before and after the homicide. As Dawn makes friends among Manatee Beach residents, as well as a potential enemy or two, she looks for answers in evidence as different as the “mysterious man” in her aunt’s life and a possible link between Amy and at least one of the other victims. Most disturbing of all, however, is the likelihood that the murderer is someone in the small Florida community. Moore (Murder at the Country Club, 2018, etc.) excels at character development. Dawn is a smashing protagonist who’s trusting but not naive and who doesn’t abide insolence, including that of the postal carrier who litters his discourse with sexist epithets, such as “girlie.” But the neighborhood comprises numerous well-rounded characters, making it all the more difficult for readers to identify the killer. A subplot involving someone in a (probable) romance with Dawn isn’t fully developed, although this hardly affects the solid mystery. Moore’s pithy writing ably couples the small-scale setting with an often moody environment. For example, tension rises in the final act, which unfolds during an impending—and then full-blown—storm, complete with a power failure and resultant darkness.
Robust characters populate a crafty and entertaining whodunit.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70789-975-3
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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